It should be no surprise that Cosimo Matassa is the recipient of OffBeat’s first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award given to a member of the New Orleans music business community. Although he’s not a musician, Matassa has been a crucial figure in the development of New Orleans rhythm and blues, Dixieland, rock and roll, soul, and blues. For a quarter century, from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, Matassa engineered virtually every significant recording in New Orleans at one of his three studios...